Personalization online has been a dream of commercial websites since the Internet's rise to prominence 20 years ago, and startup Evergage hopes to bring that Web experience fine tuning to marketers everywhere.

Behavioral Targeting

Evergage was previously Apptegic, a start up that launched in 2012 and changed its name in 2013 simply because it fit the company's product better, CEO and co founder Karl Wirth said in an interview. The word app in the old name made people think it was all about mobile apps, he said.

Now, as the company grows its engagement tool for Web, mobile Web and app environments, it has to contend with that long held dream of true personalization.

"Flexible, behavior based personalization is part of all marketers' jobs," Wirth said. "In the past, even five years ago, it was often seen as too complex and too expensive."

Evergage is a Javascript based system that allows for websites to install a few lines of code that can then render customized messages and layouts that adapt to a visitor's unique profile. This includes tools for tracking engagement, segmenting behavior, driving traffic, engagement scoring and more. Anything a business needs to move customers along the conversion funnel.

Think of a website that is holding an upcoming webinar it advertises at the top of its homepage. If someone signs up for the event, then returns to the main page, that webinar banner may not need to be there since that visitor already signed up. This is one example where the Evergage system would remove the banner upon a person's revisiting the main page in favor of a more relevant message.

The system focuses on behaviors instead of attributes, and more is learned about visitors than just what browser they are using and where they came from, for example.

Privacy, Pricing

Evergage supports Do Not Track, Wirth said, and in cases where customer data needs to be anonymized, the company is happy to do it, he added. All visitor attributes can be seen in the Evergage dashboard, and all stats and testing information is viewed there. As a hosted service, Evergage allows users to sign in and model their settings based on whatever rules they need to have applied.

A few use cases for the Evergage engagement platform.

The company is nearing 100 customers, Wirth said, and though it is not yet profitable, it is making money. So far, customers have been concentrated in the Web app, ecommerce, content and community sectors, Worth said, and a recent DrupalCon visit opened it up to even wider interest.

Acquia is a partner of Evergage, a situation that came about as a result of Acquia's excitement about using Evergage on its own sites, Wirth said. Now Acquia offers Evergage to Drupal adopters around the world as a way to bolster the ecosystem's digital marketing offerings.

Evergage pricing is based on the number of monthly active unique visitors.